Welcome to our monthly feature, Close-ing Time – in partnership with TheClose.com.



Chris Linsell from TheClose.com as a real estate coach discusses strategies for the real estate agents to use. Chris discusses how new agents, especially the ones with low transactions per year, need to use lead generation and social media to start conversations with their clients. Chris also emphasizes the importance of using “boom times” as an opportunity to change the angle on how the relationships will start and the fact that the need for housing doesn’t change.



If you’d prefer to watch this interview, click here to view on YouTube!



Chris Linsell can be reached at [email protected].



This episode is brought to you by Real Geeks.











Transcript



D.J. Paris 0:00We know the market has shifted in 2023. And we know it's going to be a tough year for realtors. So what are the cornerstone activities that you need to be focused on right now? We're going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren't converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.



Welcome to get real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris and your guide and host through the show today is our monthly series called closing time with Chris Lin sell from the close. This is a partnership between keeping it real and the closed.com. Let me tell you more about the clothes. The clothes.com is the kind of real estate website designed to give agents teams and brokerages actionable strategic insight from industry professionals, they cover real estate marketing, lead gen technology team building strategies, and many other things from the perspective of working agents and brokers who want to take their business or their brokerage to the next level, please visit the closed.com That's th e c l o s e.com. Just like it's just like you would assume and check out some of their articles. I highly encourage everybody right now go to the clothes.com. And at the very least subscribe to their newsletter because if you're like me, sometimes you forget to check websites that you check regularly. Maybe you'll forget. But what's great about the clothes is when they publish articles, they send out these digests emails that are incredible. Every article they they produces I'm I'm just such a big fan of their writing style. So go there, subscribe to their newsletter, so you'll get their regular communication with us as always as crystallin cell. He's the staff writer, he is a staff writer at sorry, senior staff writer and real estate coach. He's actually Head of Content creation for the whole site. I always forget to that he is he is the big kahuna over there. Chris is the closes also, he's the closest resident expert on real estate topics, ranging from marketing lead gen transactional best practices and everything in between. But what what what else is Chris all about? Well, he's also a licensed real estate agent in Michigan. He's been part of hundreds of sales transactions from modest role starter homes to massive waterside compounds. And when he's not writing or coaching, he you can find him fly fishing or I don't know, maybe not this time of year, but he is into fishing. And also he performs on the stage of his community theaters, local local production. So Chris, glad to have you back on keeping it real and excited to speak with you.



Chris Linsell 3:41DJ, thanks for having me. That might be the longest intro. I stumbled over places I speak so I'm not complaining about it. I like hearing about but you're definitely putting in putting in the word the word count there. I like it.



D.J. Paris 3:58Yeah, well, it's it You deserve it. Because not only are your gracious enough to come on our show, but you speak all over the country. You've spoken at the NAR annual conference, you've spoken at local, more regional and even state level. You know conferences, you are a sought after speaker. And so we're just excited to have you so I probably aren't. I'm not saying enough things about enough nice things about how how lucky we are to have this.



Chris Linsell 4:25Well, that's nice of you to say, Yeah, happy to connect with folks wherever I get a chance to share a little bit of conversation, maybe hop on a stage and impart some some knowledge and some maybe some ideas for how we can build better businesses and actually I kind of came with a bee in my bonnet today. I hope it's okay. That I hijack things a little bit but I let's do it. I had some conversations over the weekend with some real estate professionals in my local market. I'm in Michigan, Northern Michigan and And, you know, up here in the northern, the northern reaches of the Lower Peninsula, it is not uncommon to real estate for real estate as a business to really be a tale of two cities, you have the agents who are like, crushing it seeing you see their signs in every other yard. They're doing 40 5060 transactions a year, really staying busy. And then you also have the agents who are maybe clearing 10 transactions a year that are maybe working for smaller, less aggressive brokerages. And then I had some conversations around that latter group of agents that were interested in this weekend, I'd love to chat with you a little bit about it, specifically, some of the things I was talking about and hearing from agents who, you know, aren't they, they don't have their name up in lights, they do real estate full time, like this is their job. But they're, they're not clear on more than 10 or 15 transactions a year. This is going to be an interesting year for those folks, especially if they are not adequately preparing themselves.



D.J. Paris 6:08Yeah, I agree. So the top producers I know and the ones I feature on the show when I asked them, hey, you know, sort of behind the scenes, like what do you think about 2023, they're like, well, it's definitely going to be most of the agents I've spoken to say I believe it's going to be, you know, I'll definitely not be hitting the number of transactions I did. 2021 2022 was also first three quarters were fine. But last quarter was was pretty tough for most people. But these top producers don't seem to be too worried. You know, their business may take a small hit, but they have so much that their sphere is so big, and their previous client list is so vast that they tend to do just fine. It's your right, and our brokerage in particular, the vast majority of our agents are in that lower producing category. That's just kind of our model. And we love those agents. But we also those are very vulnerable agents when the market shifts and so I love to talk about this because it will help our agents as well. Yeah, I



Chris Linsell 7:02mean, I mean, think about it, like if you make a million dollars GCI you're crushing it in any just about any market. And if you take a 30% hit on your business, and that's that's nothing to sneeze at, but you're gonna have to subsist on $700,000 GCI this year, which you know, I'm sure you're going to be able to figure figure your way through. If you make $50,000 a year, and you take a 30% bath, all of a sudden you're making $35,000 GCI is difficult to pay the rent and the mortgage and the daycare bills on 35k. So yeah, but I want to talk more more than just GCI here. I wanted to bring up the first the first kind of interesting question that I had was an agent I was chatting with said, Should I be worried about my brokerage this year, like they work in a mom and pop brokerage. They're one of six agents. Everybody's kind of in the same boat here. They don't have like a big marquee. They're not buying billboards, they're running a pretty small business. Do they need to be worried about their brokerage right now? And I said in no uncertain terms, you don't need to be worried. But you do need to be actively asking the right questions. It is not out of line to my will to your managing broker and say, Hey, listen, I just want to make sure we're set up for the for the for the year for the future here. Just want to check and see how things are going. You're gonna find some interesting conversations are gonna come from that for sure.



D.J. Paris 8:39We found 1000 brokerages here locally that when we looked at their production, we looked at their numbers, the number of agents, number of transactions, and we said, oh, wow, we we don't see, we see. We see challenges for these 1000 firms. And so I sent out 1000 emails to these companies and saying, Hey, if you're nervous about this year, if you're, if you're worried about, you know, whether you I didn't say stay in business, but that was the assumption. If you're nervous about this year, you know, we may want to merge with you, or we can absorb some of your costs. And we can figure out some sort of structure that works. And so we sent out 1000 individual emails and what was really interesting,

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